As Inspirated’s domain name was about to expire in mid November, I finally did what I had been planning to do for about two years now: migrate my webhost. I will elaborate more on reasons behind this decision in part 3/3 of webhost migration blogposts where I will recount the bellyaches caused by my previous webhost.

The process of migrating the webhost took almost a week. Still, the process is not as intimidating as I initially thought it would be. To summarize, I had to:

Buy a webhosting package on Go Daddy.

Ask the support the nameservers which I need to point my domain to.

Ask my current web hosts to change the nameservers to the new ones.

At this point, emails for Inspirated stopped working and the website went down.

Setup hosting account through the Go Daddy interface.

Setup email and restore files and databases from previous website.

From this point onwards, everything worked smoothly as the rest of the migration process took no toll on the site’s uptime itself. In fact, migrating the web host was the technically hard part (e.g., database restoring process got stuck because of a weird, weird Unicode issue). After it was done, migration of domain name was more of a responsibility of the domain registrars than me.

Sign up for a Go Daddy domain transfer.

Ask the losing registrar for domain’s EPP key.

Authorize the transfer on Go Daddy’s website using the EPP key as well as the security code and transaction ID received in the email sent by Go Daddy to the administrative contact of the domain.

Once authorized, wait for the transfer to complete. Since folks at the losing registrar had to be as much of a bitch as they possibly could, they did not approve the transfer. Luckily, according to ICANN rules, the transfer automatically went through after 5-7 days of authorization.

Done and dusted. I actually fell in love with Go Daddy’s Total DNS Control. Which, by the way, was a great shift for me since my previous hosts were bunch of wanna-bes who had fuck all idea about what to do with their reseller hosting accounts. What I genuinely dislike about GD though is its monster of a website. Seriously, it looks like it was specifically designed to eat lesser internet connections and choke processors which do not overclock on at least 8 GHz. Providentially, they do provide SSH access which is a sigh of relief for me since I can use that black and white bloat-less terminal to manage my account.

Part 2/3 will detail my experience with setting up Google Apps on Inspirated. Needless to say, G’s love.